Where I would usually use the Widescreen Matte generator in FCP 7 to apply a 2.35:1 matte and offset my clips accordingly I can't seem to find that generator or its equivelent in FCP X. Has anyone found a work around for this? The key for me is being able to easily offset my clips as needed.

Pick a clip on the timeline, go to effects and find letterbox. You can choose "stylize" to reduce the number of filters. Drag the effect onto your clip. The ratio choices are available in the inspector window.

I find it interesting that they have implemented this as an effect rather than a generator. As a generator it was just a matte which you could offset the image underneath. As an effect unless I am missing something there is no way to fine tune your framing for each clip.

I can probably whip something up pretty quickly for you. However, in FCP3-7 this was a filter, not a generator, that could be applied to each clip so that you could shift the underlying image up and down.

I made an effect template for you that works exactly like the Widescreen filter in previous versions of FCP with Offset, Border Size, Border Color and Opacity.
Just unzip it and drop into your ...Movies/Motion Templates/Effects folder and it will show up in effects when you search for "widescreen."
I've attached a screen grab as well so you can see how it should look.

Tim you are a wizard! Thanks so much for that it works great! I don't know how the hell you did it, but big props to ya!

For everything that went "missing" in FCP X, there was actually a lot of cross-compatibility added to Motion 5 so it is fairly easy to put together basic geometric effects for FCP X or even tunnel FxPlug plugins back into FCP X. That's basically what I did since the Widescreen filter was FxPlug and still existed in Motion 5.
This same technique can be used to port over lots of the old FxPlug plugins. Just let me know what seems to be missing and I can do it quickly.
I've spent the last three days doing the same thing for all my own plugins.

Then it's time to finally learn Motion for me.

Thank you, Thank you very much Tim, for you matte generator.

2 questions:

Which offset must need to have a matte : 1: 2,40 ?

And how to put the matte on all the clips (without compound clips) ?

Greetings from South of France/Provence

Tim - what you have created may solve my problem too - THANKS for this - I cannot seem to find the path "Movies/Motion Templates/Effects folder" to drag your widescreen folder into - I am on a mac pro tower - am i missing something?

Is that a path for Motion? I may have misunderstood -- I thought it was fix for Premiere CS 5.5 !